Once a year, Richard Alston gives a short season at his home theatre trying out repertory that may not suit a larger stage. It's an opportunity to have fun and, certainly, one of the two works premiered here looks more like a game, or an experiment, than a dance.

Commissioned by the Royal Philharmonic Society as part of a project dedicated to the art of listening, Alert deploys four dancers like articulate lab rats, requiring them to perform sequences of movements in various conditions - in silence, with their eyes shut, and to the accompaniment of an electronic score. It becomes clear how dependent their performances are on a complexity of visual and aural clues. Alston singles out one to respond to his own impromptu verbal instructions, then to repeat the movement from memory. It's a neat demonstration of the art and intelligence of the dancer, although Wayne Parsons's risk-taking work and Alston's humour make it too absorbing to feel like a lesson.

New work Serene Beneath is set to piano by Alexei Stanchinsky. In this year of the Ballets Russes centenary, this is Alston's nod to history, his choreography referencing the iconic Diaghilev commission Apollo, with an imitation of its signature sunburst pose and riffs around its daisy-chain patterns. Dreamy, delicate, beguiling, it's a lovely miniature. By contrast, the final two works, Alston's Blow Over and Martin Lawrance's Brink, were created for the big stage. Transposed to the Place, we get to see the mechanics of the choreography. But these are works I would love to see ramped up to big, blatant spectacle.